27.8.10

Another angel has fallen. This time it was somewhere above the last empty metres of a frozen urban landscape, expectedly smoggy, unusually dark and politically correct. This city was also a battlefield, where the casualties of war still lingered along half-witted, half-noticed, while letting themselves drop into ergonomic metro seats or hang from precarious bus bars in their daily apparitions. This angel, this fallen angel in particular, never heard his piercing cry ring alarmingly in the ears of all those flag wavers and name droppers, as well as random taxi stoppers; this howl of pain and expression voyaged in time and space, affected slightly by the Doppler effect, towards its final objective, and in doing so managed to turn a couple of the million heads in town. That fatal thud he must have received with his eyes clenched in need, in an extraordinary overcoming of blackening fever and an overdosing of the hypothalamus. In those last fractions of a second the chemistry of the brain must have gone wild, with great haemorrhages of complex compounds which would have reacted with the cerebral electrical activity and made of the angel’s head a bomb on countdown. The damage was irreversible and evidently mortal, if not instantaneous : such stress must have surely fired off a vicious voragine of images, sounds, memories, thoughts and sensations of undeniable power. And then a nanosecond of silence and immobility, seeing the calm cloudy sky and not feeling anything, just waiting for death to pick him up. And then nothing.

Until out of the dead an inverted echo made disdainful appearance, trickling uniformly from the walls of this perfumed paradise; along the frightened vision of deformed beauty actors and actresses of light flanked the way, inane and soundless. Which flowers lay ahead, unaverted, undisturbed, waiting to bloom in the face of the foreigner? How many things could he actually whisper?

“Silence!” exuded the Prince authoritatively. “Only in this cruel, cols corner, forgotten by sun and man alike, have I coughed but blood and hard cartilage, and you still have cause to celebrate?» The livid body remembered the cluster of feelings that had choked it, thrown it into exile. Yet under this new, matterless shape, he could not feel how his lungs collapsed, blown into pieces not unlike rotten Emmenthal.The Prince saw how he was falling apart in rays of transparent light and sang a song that buried itself deep in the burrows of the cosiest rabbits hibernating in the midst of a crazy snowstorm. And the song said that the Prince was blind and that he wished to see the face of his Princess, and that he longed to burn in hell because a furnace as big as the underworld would not suffice to warm up his prison of icicles, this negative-Kelvin, maximum-security cell that constituted his source of unwanted privacy.

“Thank you for the alibi and the sacrilege,” said the archbishop, while attempting to overcome his weak pulse in order to serve the defence lawyer a cup of tea.

“Quite an honour, your holiness, considering that all the dirty jobs were left for my people to accomplish”. Here he looked right straight in his client’s eye, adding, “Overall, it was quite a remarkable experience…»

“It flickered wildly, this confusion…,” remarked the supposed holy man, leaving the reasoning to his lawyer.

“Sure,” added the latter with a small involuntary upsurge of saliva which caused a laughable cacophony, and prompted the lawyer to clear his throat before continuing, “It was comparable to that fresh morning air of the countryside, in the middle of autumn and before the sun attempts exit”.

“You still know, Geghellman, that it was that spiny speech of yours to the jury that saved my lost cause once and for all, don’t you? Thank you ever so much,” murmured the archbishop as he handed the tea to his guest, adding in a more enriched, piercing tone, “Now drink this tea : it is made with Holy Water”.

Geghellman was a kind who frequented bullfights even though he was against the killing of animals and such beasts. He wore glasses small as shells and held by an unlikely little wire; he was bald and Aryan, as well as markedly sickly, with clerical (one would feel inclined to say spasmodic) air around him on this particular evening, as if Christ had just appeared before him.

The archbishop was sipping his tea proper, stroking the cup in random motion while staring at his dainty, over-ostentatious Dutch ring, when his attendant came in to observe. At about the same exact time, Geghellman (who had already finished his tea, walked out of the cathedral, and been erring the streets like a raincoated asphalt-addict for over thirty minutes) had worked out that he had to “PUSH” to get into the McDonald’s, and proceeded to exercise a good shove on the heavy metal door. His tendency to pull a door before pushing it could indicate an inferiority complex of paranoid dimensions. He continued, head down and eyeing people with horse eyes, toward the counter, where he waited in a short queue with a queer grimace, then purchased several donuts and a coffee in a nervous manner, almost whispering. He took his gabardine in pathetic twists and jerks in almost every possible direction, munched hastily and assuringly on a jam-oozing donut before leaving everything and heading through a turning door : the toilets.

“Fools!” elated the Prince. “What you have regurgitated it is assumed that will regurgitate through the throats of others too, but this enigma of the forest of the incarcerated blind is overcoming my dreams, and I am very pushed to get to the end of the matter”.

The archbishop was already fucking his attendant anxiously in his office when the 1979 video that been rewinding a stolen third copy of “The Godfather” since 1982 finished the duty it had been ordered to accomplish years earlier. And it did so with a loud, sharp metallic clack that was frame-marked in your mind forever. The counter read 1113.

In the toilet behind the paper there is a hole in the wall through which people can look and hence spy on the clientele of the supposed restaurant. Geghellman knew the spot: he came to these toilets for regular masturbatory sessions, frequently at fixed hours to observe particular, fixed clients towards whom he had strange, hallucinatory fixations that rendered him pallid, afraid, cold-sweated every night, in strong reminders of sadomasochistic morale. Now he was looking in particular at a boy of about 14 or 15, with his younger brother with whom he had caught up three months, four days earlier. He did not know his name, the tone of his voice, the profession of his father or the softness of his skin; albeit this, only the thought of any one of these details made his dormant appendix slowly take shape. Slowly. Sometimes he would torture himself sweetly somewhere to obtain ungainly pleasure, sometimes he liked to hear the alarm ring in his head that he approached collision, before letting go. He held his breath for minutes that weighed so much while someone was often leaking or even taking a dump in the neighbouring toilet.

The police and the ambulance were all at the foot of the building, the swarm of their uniforms and their vehicles prevailed over the crowded street. Just across, next to a small park, two confused FBI agents got out of their standard car with their plastic cups of coffee and drank all the way to the back door of the McDonald’s. They had 30 seconds to get in, but the door seemed to be jammed, so they ran in through the front door and headed to the back showing their badges in what seemed an eternity.

Geghellman panicked when the boy got up and disappeared from his field of vision, practically seconds away from a tempting ejaculation.Guess who came into the toilets, Geghellman thought, reaching under to look : it was indeed the boy, he was all alone. He crept up from behind the boy during a tense minute, while the boy was taking a leak, then covered his mouth while holding him with a force that did not pertain to a man of his appearance, then pulled his trousers down only to stab him mercilessly and repeatedly with his organs, while stroking those, smaller, of the boy. For the lawyer, days elapsed while he came into the kid’s rectum, days of holding him clench-teethed against the urinals and the white tiles.

For the archbishop’s sperm, it must have taken a few months to follow the way up his assistant’s vagina and reach the egg, but it was in reality a much shorter time that had elapsed before the assistant, a Greek, red-haired peasant, was pregnant. She would bear a blind child upon a breezy night in September, and the baby would be taken from her two days after, and sent across the dark forest in a robust cart pulled by two horses led by two men with no mouth or ears, one in the front and one in the back. After days of rain and darkness, the cart would reach a concentration camp where thousands of blind people howl, among the flashlights, imprisoned behind kilometres of barbed wire. The scent of fear and fresh soil and ashes of carbonized bodies made the rain acid and turned the place into a toxic wasteland. The faces of the blind were corroded and deformed, only this baby being safe, and the ones that would come after him.

The archbishop did not know what had happened until after the nuclear explosion, when he found his face between church banks, imprisoned and sort of blind, too. He quivered around a bit and looked at the bleak rays of inflammatory sunlight that illuminated the virgin when she – the virgin, that is – took life, descended from her pedestal and took out the man’s eyes.